Tuesday, April 11, 2017

It's T-SQL Tuesday time again - the monthly blog party was
started by Adam Machanic (blog/@AdamMachanic) and each month someone different
selects a new topic. This month's cycle
is hosted by Koen Verbeeck (blog/@Ko_Ver) and his chosen topic is "The Times They Are A-Changing" considering changing technologies and how we see them impacting our careers in the future. (His idea
came from a great article/webcast by Kendra Little (blog/@Kendra_Little) titled
"Will the Cloud Eat My DBA Job?" - check it out too!)

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I remember my first contact with this topic came a long time ago (relatively) from a very reliable source having a little April Fool's Day fun:

A previous April Fools joke, but one of my favorites. Enjoy it today on this holiday - Steve.

I can't believe it. My sources at Micrsoft put out the word late yesterday that there is a project underway to port SQL Server to Linux!!

The exclusive word I got through some close, anonymous sources is that Microsoft realizes that they cannot stamp out Linus. Unlike OS/2 and the expensive, high end Unices, Linux is here to stay. Because of the decentralized work on it, the religous-like fever of its followers, and the high performance that it offers, the big boys, maybe just one big boy, at Microsoft have given in to the fact that it will forever be nipping at the heals of Windows.

And they know that all the work being done on clients for Exchange means that many sites that might want to switch the desktop, may still keep the server on Exchange and have a rich client front end that takes the place of Outlook. But don't rule against Outlook making a run at the Linux platform.

SQL Server, however, is a true platform that doesn't need a client to run against. With SQL Server 2005 and it's CLR integration, the platform actually expands into the application server space and can support many web development systems on a single server, within two highly integrated applications: SQL Server and IIS.And with MySQL nipping away at many smaller installations that might have switched to SQL Server before, it's time to do something. So a top secret effort has been porting the CLR using Mono, along with the core relational engine to the Linux platform. The storage engine requires a complete rewrite as the physical storage model of Linux is radially different from that of Windows.

Integration Services, the next evolution of DTS, has already been ported with some impressive numbers of throughput. Given that many different sources need a high quality ETL engine, and a SQL Server license to handle this is still cheaper than IBM's Information Integration product and most other tools, there's hope that Integration Services will provide the foothold into Linux.

No work on pricing, but from hallway conversation it's looking like there will be another tier of licensing that will be less expensive than the Workgroup edition without CALs. There is still supposed to be a small, free version without Integration Services that competes against many small LAMP installations.

There isn't a stable complete product yet, heck, we don't even have the Windows version, but our best guess is that a SQL Server 2005b for Linux will release sometime in mid to late 2006 and the two platforms will then synch development over the next SQL Server cycle.

Moving onto a free platform is a difficuly and challenging task. Especially when you are coming from the proprietary software world. But Microsoft did it once before by moving into the free world of the Internet and taking on Netscape. I'm betting they will do it again.

And I'm sure...that SQL Server...is the best...;

April Fools!!!

Over ten years ago Steve Jones (blog/@way0utwest) of SQLServerCentral thought he was kidding but was actually looking forward into the future in which we are about to live.

Well I have finally cracked it, after years of trying (and a little help from the R2 release) to get SQL Server to install and run happily on the Linux Platform. I could hardly believe it when it all came together, but I’m very pleased that it has. What is even more exciting is that the performance of the SQL Engine is going through the roof.

I am not entirely sure why this is, but I am assuming it is partly related to the capabilities of the EXT4 filesystem and the latest Linux Kernel improvements.

So here’s how I did it :-

Install WINE

Install the .NET 3.5 framework into WINE. This is very important, otherwise the SQL Server 2008R2 installer will fail.

Ensure that you run setup.exe from SQL Server R2 Enterprise Edition – please note that SQL Server 2008 Release 1.5 will not work, and I additionally had problems with the Standard Edition of R2 (but not entirely sure if there is a restriction here with SQL Standard Edition Licensing on Linux).

SQL running happily in WINE on Linux Mint 10 (x64)

I think that the EXT4 filesystem is key to the success of your installation, since when I attempted this deployment using the EXT2 and EXT3 filesystems, SQL Server appeared to have issues installing.

I hope to provide more instructions and performance feedback to you all over the coming months. Enjoy!

Microsoft Certified Master Mark Broadbent (blog/@retracement) gave it a different spin - instead of a spoofed Microsoft announcement he set it up as "look what I did!" and didn't confirm the April Fool until several days later.

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Microsoft got in on the act in March of 2016 (notable *not* on April Fool's Day) with a blog post headed with this logo:

Suddenly, it was all real.

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When I read the announcement and subsequent blog posts and saw the follow-up webcasts, I thought one thing to myself over and over.

WHAT DO I DO KNOW?

I am an infrastructure DBA and have been for over seventeen years. One of my strengths has always been my ability to look beyond SQL Server and dig into the operating system and its components, such as Windows Clustering.

I don't know anything about Linux (other than recognizing this guy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux

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I am moderately ashamed to admit I did what many people do in this situation, and what I know many DBA's are still doing on this topic...

http://www.theecologist.org/siteimage/scale/800/600/388011.png

I quietly ignored it and went about my life and job, putting off the problem until later.

Time passed and Microsoft released a "public preview"/CTP of what they began calling "SQL Server vNext" for Linux, and it became more real. Then they released another, and another - as of this writing the current CTP is version 1.4 (download it here).

I recently realized I hadn't progressed past my original query:

WHAT DO I DO KNOW?

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I have determined that there are three parts to the answer of this question:

(1) I need to continue to play with the CTP's and be ready to embrace the as-yet-unannounced RTM version. Everything I have seen so far has greatly impressed me with how similar the look and feel truly is to "normal" SQL Server on Windows. Obviously there isn't a GUI-style Management Studio for non-GUI Linux, but connecting to a Linux-hosted SQL Server instance from a Windows-client Management Studio is basically seamless. From a Linux host we can use SQLCMD and it looks and feels just like Windows SQLCMD.

(2) I need to commit myself to learning more about Linux, at least at the base levels. I have written numerous times before about the never-ending quest for knowledge we are all on, and this is just the next topic to pursue in a long line. I was happy to see that there are many classes on Pluralsight related to Linux and Linux administration. This subject has been something that was down there on my priority list below Powershell and a few other things, but it needs to move up and will do so.

(Side note - if you don't have a Pluralsight subscription, I think you should - it is an awesome resource full of recorded classes on an unbelievable number of topics, including many classes on SQL Server. You can get a ten-day free trial membership here.)

(3) I need to find more excuses to work with colleagues and potentially with clients on this new technology. None of us exist in a vacuum, and everyone has a different spin on a given topic. I recently attended a Microsoft workshop on this topic and it was very interesting to see the different insights from not only the variety of MS speakers but also the other workshop attendees. Interacting with peers and clients will help me learn even more quickly by providing their insights and by requiring me to research and test to answer their questions.

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As with all technology changes, this definitely *will* change our jobs, and like many other things in the SQL Server world, the answer to how it will affect any given individual is:

The impact to you will be determined by your ability to adapt and learn - if you are willing to embrace change (a dirty phrase to many DBA's) and learn new things, this will be an exciting time - not only will you need to learn new things, you will find yourself interacting with a new class of I.T. Professionals you may have never spoken to before - the Linux Administrator.

Friday, April 7, 2017

Recently a client requested some new transactional replication publications on a relatively new pre-production server. The client has plenty of transactional and snapshot replication in their environment, including two other publications on this instance already, so this was just adding more to the existing pile.

Object Reference not set to an instance of an object, (ConfigureDistWizard)

Um...OK...

My first instinct was that something was broken with the tools on the existing server - I RDP'ed to a different client server, and received the same errors when trying to create a publication for this server.

Hmm...

I have had experiences before where the REPL wizards just don't work (such as creating subscriptions to a higher version publication) so I said, "FINE, I'll just use the code!"

...but the sp_addpublication query threw me the same problem.

https://cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder61/250x250/71896061.jpg

At this point I figured that something must have been wrong with the replication components themselves - the server was new and not *really* production yet so maybe something had been fouled at setup.

***NOTE*** - I did *not* take the one step I should have at this point - since there were existing publications on a different user database, I should have paused and considered what was wrong with *this particular database* rather than with the instance at large - it would have saved us roughly 24 hours.

I advised the client I would script out the two existing publications and then completely disable and re-enable publishing and distribution on the instance and try again.

No good...

At this point the client suggested blowing away the VM and setting it up again - I could take backups of the existing user databases and restore them after they recreated the VM from scratch. I told them I could continue to investigate but they decided to go ahead with the rebuild.

Even after the server rebuild, I
found that the problem with the Publication Wizard still existed! More than
a little research found that it was due to the particular database still
having some old replication components in it – older than the current version
and therefore not cleaned up when I tried running sp_removedbreplication across
the user databases to try to restart replication setup from scratch.
Since the problem was in one of the user databases it still existed after
the rebuild since we just restored the old databases onto the new server!

This resolved the issue and
allowed the New Publication Wizard to move forward.

In the post-mortem, we found that the impacted database had originally been provided by a vendor and that it almost certainly had been migrated from an older version of SQL Server, hence the old components.

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I want to draw attention to the fact that the blog post I referenced above doesn't have anything to do with errors in the replication New Publication wizard. It discusses a "bug" in SQL Server 2005 the author encountered while trying to apply a 2005 service pack. I found this post simply by spreading my search criteria from my specific error of "Synonym 'dbo.MSreplication_subscriptions' refers to an invalid object" down to simply "dbo.MSreplication_subscriptions error"

When troubleshooting (and searching for information online in general), never discount something simply because it doesn't match your specific situation. You may find as in this case that there is some shared underlying problem that caused a certain set of symptoms for you but had manifest as a different yet similar set of symptoms for someone else. If you are looking for a specific error or message and not finding anything, cast your net a little wider by reducing your criteria - always start with your specific message, but if you don't get anything useful try again, and instead of searching for "Really Long Error Message about this Object and Some Other Stuff" look instead for "<object> <other stuff> error/warning/whatever"

As always, proceed with caution, but this is true even when you *do* find a blog post/newsgroup post/Connect item/etc. that *does* exactly match your situation - just because renaming an index fixed Error 123456 for someone else doesn't necessarily mean it will for you - always consider the potential impact of any course of action *before* deploying it anywhere, even to Dev/Test.

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About Me

I’m a forty-something Microsoft SQL Server DBA of 15+ years, a devoted husband, and a father of three young boys. I have been a DBA at a public university, at a major bank, at a healthcare system, and I now work as a remote DBA with customers across the United States.
I write and speak primarily about the tips and tricks that I discover along my SQL Server journey.
I am on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DBA_ANDY), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/DBAAndy), and LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/dbaandy/).